Kay McSpadden, a high school teacher and writer in South Carolina, notes a striking irony. In the midst of School Chiice Week, two major reports appeared that showed the success of our public schools.
The federal National Center for Education Statistics “report shows that in schools with less than 25 percent poverty rates, American children scored higher in reading than any other children in the world. In. The. World.
“The takeaway is simple. Our middle-class and wealthy public school children are thriving. Poor children are struggling, not because their schools are failing but because they come to school with all the well-documented handicaps that poverty imposes – poor prenatal care, developmental delays, hunger, illness, homelessness, emotional and mental illnesses, and so on.”
A second report, by the Horace Mann League and National Superintendents Roundtable, says the United States is, “by far, the wealthiest and best-educated of the nine G-7 countries studied….yet it posts some of the worst measures of economic inequality, social stress, and support for young families. We have the highest rates of substance abuse and violent deaths, for example, issues which negatively affect children and their performance in school……”
“The report asks communities to recognize that schools alone can’t address those formative forces.
“For policymakers, the report says, “Celebrate the success of schools while helping address some of the out-of-school issues that challenge educators, communities, and young people every day. Enact constructive laws and policies that constantly support people on the front lines of our future. Encourage rather than withhold funds for research in the social, behavior, and economic sciences to advance the well-being of the nation’s people. Treat education as a ticket to an even better future, not as a political football.”
“The report concludes that “Nobody understands the challenges and shortcomings of American schools better than the people who have dedicated their lives to them.” Yet educators are rarely asked for their expertise. That snub is bipartisan – with Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo taking a combative stand against public school teachers in his recent inaugural address, and Republican Governors of Nevada and Texas establishing committees on education comprised solely of non-educators.”
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2015/01/30/5483360/public-schools-arent-failing.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
Amen…
The middle class is thriving?
Excellent report that shows the obvious… Poverty matters if you are chasing test scores as indicators of achievement.
The snub of wisdom from educators is bipartisan. Sad to see that Elizabeth Warren has joined with Democrats who think testing in the solution. She is wrong to think this is the best or only way to track the distribution of ESEA funds and to monitor inequities. With the national poverty rate of over 50%, proxy is students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch, there should be a clear commitment to supporting students teachers and schools, not yelling that at least half of you are scheduled to be failures because the test scores are designed to do just that.
Testing teachers and schools into oblivion is going to collapse under its own weight. Testing is a siren call trapping those looking for simple solutions. As a nation, we put humans on the moon, but now seem to ignore the complexities of education and impose what is clearly the wrong approach. America wants quick, tweet sized solutions to difficult problems. Serve up official looking PowerPoints from Very Serious People, and everyone is happy with ranking teachers on a scale of 1 to 4 or schools as pass/fail.
My one daughter today was talking about an education career in science. I had to be honest with her and tell her education is no longer a career and the future looks grim. We watch as her best teachers leave the field for jobs with better pay and more respect. It is a pattern being repeated far too often.
Dean Baker’s contribution to the Jacobin & CTU CORE Activist Teacher Handbook is still as relevant as ever: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/unremedial-education/
“It’s common in policy circles to claim that improving the quality of education in inner cities and impoverished rural areas is the answer to halting the growing gap between rich and poor. This view reflects not only illusions about the potential for substantially improving education for children from low- and moderate-income families without deeper economic and political shifts, but also a serious misunderstanding about the growth of inequality over the last three decades.
There should be no surprise, then, that the education reform movement has failed in its effort to boost educational outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At this point, education “reform” is hardly new; it is the establishment consensus, having led the national agenda on education for the last quarter century. The extent to which it has produced gains can be debated, but it has, without a doubt, not turned around struggling schools. The children in these schools still perform consistently worse on standardized tests and have much poorer career prospects than children attending wealthy suburban public schools or private ones.
But even if reform had improved education, it is unlikely to have done much about inequality. People with more education have, on average, done better than those with less education, but the growth in inequality over the last three decades has not been mainly a story of the more educated pulling away from the less educated. Rather, it has been a story in which a relatively small group of people (roughly the top one percent) have been able to garner the bulk of economic gains for reasons that have little direct connection to education.
The classic story of the education and inequality story is usually captured by the college/non-college premium: the ratio of the pay of those with college degrees to those without college degrees. This premium showed a substantial rise in the 1980s for both men and women. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, the college premium for men rose from 20.2% at the 1979 business cycle peak to 34% at the business cycle peak in 1989. For women, the premium rose from 25% in 1979 to 40% in 1989.
Interestingly, the sharpest rise, especially for men, was during the high unemployment years at the start of the decade. The rise in the college/non-college pay gap is often attributed to technology and the growing use of computers in the workplace, in particular. But the largest rise in the college premium occurred at a point in time when computers were just being introduced to the workplace.
If the timing of the rise in the pay gap in the 1980s doesn’t fit the technology story very well, the wage trend in the last two decades is even harder to square with this picture. There was a much smaller increase in the college premium in the 1990s than in the 1980s — even though this was the period of the tech boom, when information technology led to a marked acceleration in the rate of productivity growth. After having risen by almost fourteen percent in the 1980s business cycle, the college premium for men rose by just 8% from 1989 to the business cycle peak in 2000. For women, the premium increased by 7.9% points in the 1990s cycle after increasing 15% in the 1980s.
The 2000s don’t fit any better with the technology and inequality story, as even college grads could no longer count on sharing in the gains from growth. For men, the premium rose by 2.8% between 2000 and 2011. This corresponded to a 2.4% gain in wages for male college grads between 2000 and 2012. The college premium for women increased by just 0.8% points over this period, with the wages of female college grads rising by 0.7% between 2000 and 2012. This situation holds true even if we look at just the segments of the labor market where we might expect especially strong demand. The average hourly wage for college graduates working in computer and mathematical occupations increased by just 5.3% from 2000 to 2011 — less than one-third of the rate of productivity growth over this period.
The patterns in the data show that inequality is not a question of the more-educated gaining at the expense of the less-educated due to inevitable technological trends. Rather, it has been a story in which a small group of especially well-situated workers — for example, those in finance, doctors, and top-level corporate executives — have been able to gain at the expense of almost everyone else. This pattern of inequality will be little affected by improving the educational outcomes for the bottom quarter or even bottom half of income distribution.
Of course, this does not argue against efforts to improve education. It is almost always the case that workers with more education do better than workers with less education, both in terms of hourly wages and employment outcomes. Unemployment and non-employment rates are considerably higher for those with less education.
Education does provide a clear avenue for mobility. Certainly it is a positive development if children from low-income families have the opportunity to move into the middle class, even if this might imply that someone from a middle-class background will move in the opposite direction.
And education is tremendously valuable for reasons unrelated to work and income. Literacy, basic numeracy skills, and critical thinking are an essential part of a fulfilling life. Insofar as we have children going through school without developing these skills, it is an enormous failing of society. Any just society would place a top priority on ensuring that all children learn such basic skills before leaving school.
However, it clearly is not the case that plausible increases in education quality and attainment will have a substantial impact on inequality. This will require much deeper structural changes in the economy. As a practical matter, given the dismal track record of the education reformers, substantial improvement in outcomes for children from low- and moderate-income families is likely to require deep structural change in society as well.”
Re: “pay gaps” and income distribution — I often find that wealth, not income, is the best way to measure inequality. Increasingly, earning a college degree makes a lot of people poorer, not richer, by hindering their ability to save money during the very years when the compounding effect of savings and investment is strongest. This dynamic may have negative inter-generational effects that mirror the positive inter-generational effects of the post-war explosion in education levels in the US. Perhaps we’re already seeing it. I don’t know if there’s any compelling quantitative evidence of this, but it seems plausible.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
So should policy formed around education be focused on the poor students rather than trying to engage the country as a whole? Because if the system is working on one end should we allocate more of the manpower and resources to the poor students who, according to this study, seem to be the ones who need it the most?
Yes, very true. It doesn’t have to be organic or developmental. The anxiety, fear, needs of essentials add greatly to one’s higher average stress students bring to school with them. We need to be more insightful to learn that while lower socioeconomic environments do create more instances of developmental delays and other organic problems, by and learn, it is the higher average stress or higher layers of mental work we carry with us that creates a very ill-prepared student for education. When we add the much less mental, emotional, social, verbal interaction (vocabulary) and other lack of supports, (especially for boys) we can then see two major stumbling blocks for reading motivation.
Reading is an abstract skill requiring more mental energy to decode -reach in to one’s social vocabulary; visualize, organize, and enjoy the process. Students from poorer backgrounds, especially boys are seriously shortchanged from those environments.
I lived in both a housing project and also in a very nice, environment in a condominium with my grandmother. There is no comparison. In the housing project we had no knowledge and skills from family or peers. We had many many anxieties and needs. We were treated more harshly by our teachers. – Whereas in the community with my grandmother: we had much more security of needs filled that produced much more stability and ease of learning. We had much more knowledge from family, peers, and more support from teachers. We had it all.
I later developed a learning theory that redefines our average stress as many layers of mental work that take up real mental energy leaving us less mental energy to think, learn, and have motivation to learn (mental reward received for mental work expended). This theory and definition for aerage stress is much more accurate, valid, much more useful for helping students more permanently reduce layers of mental work to continually improve their lives. I realized we cannot provide everyone with a nice, stable, knowledge-rich environment. We can however show students that is not genetics or effort but our individual environments that create very different amounts of supports and very different amounts of knowledge and skills provided that do create very large differences in accumulated academic skills over time. We need to at least show students this theory. While i feel needs may be very great and take away real mental energy, I feel all students can use this theory to, at once, have much more respect for themselves and for others. Also, since these average layers are made up, not just of needs, but also of many other layers of mental work that can be reduced, this then creates a tool to help somewhat approximate the stability that exists in more stable environments. Note, in my theory pace and intensity that is so pushed in school, often causes the higher average stress from lower socioeconomic areas to feed off into much more improper pace and intensity that raises much more so the average stress of those students. This creates a third, very hurtful variable to reading for those students.